northeast toward the region called Nsundi. Raiders there, subsequently known as Teke or Tio, who spoke another language and were not affiliated with Kongo, had been attacking the Kongo of the area. The Portuguese soldiers and their firearms helped to repel the Tio, and during a decisive battle they took many captives, whom they claimed as prizes of war and then offered for sale as slaves to Portuguese traders, who were also turning up to explore the commercial potential of the region.
Unlike the carpenters, masons, and soldiers for whom Nzinga a Nkuwu had immediate uses, he found the priests problematic. He came under intense pressure from the communities in the confederation to reject these avatars of the Christian God, whose exclusivist monotheism dangerously ignored the ancestors with whose care they were entrusted. The Catholics’ insistent teachings against the polygynous marriages, through which Kongo consolidated affiliations on all levels of the polity, severely challenged its compositional framework, and not least their ties to the mani Kongo position itself, personified in the many wives they all sent to Mbanza Kongo, who gave the polity its coherence.6 Nzinga a Nkuwu rather soon yielded to these reservations, if not outright opposition, by denouncing Christianity in 1495 and expelling the priests from Mbanza Kongo.
He also expelled a son named Mvemba a Nzinga, who was evidently a very early and devout—if not also ambitious—convert to Catholicism, and who in 1493 had taken the baptismal name Afonso.7 Afonso supported the priests’ teachings in Mbanza Kongo. Nzinga a Nkuwu quieted the grumblings among the leading Kongo affiliates around him by exercising his right to place members of his own family in the regional mbanzas, the nodes of the polity where the people in its components gathered to collect the tribute that each sent to the capital. He exiled the troublesome Afonso, advocate of the new and apparently contentious set of powerful beliefs and rituals, to Nsundi as part of his cleanup in 1495. However, this banishment was to a position of authority in a prestigious and strategic region within the Kongo network. The recent repulsion of the Tio had opened access to deposits of copper ores there that were refined and formed into small ingots and circulated within the Kongo network as tokens of political recognition, and hence also of the prestige of their holders. The repulsion also opened a new supply of slaves (war captives) of particular interest to the Portuguese.
Adding a Catholic Kingdom to the Kongo Polity
Nzinga a Nkuwu’s strategy of removing Afonso from Mbanza Kongo to let politics in the capital cool might have made sense among the influential Kongo families in the short term, but in the long run it served only to elevate Afonso in the eyes of the Portuguese as a champion of their interests in central Africa. Afonso did not monopolize European interests in the following decade, but he became their central point of access. He personally supported and fostered Catholicism, and he directly or indirectly oversaw flows of the few commodity exports the Portuguese were buying at this early date, first the copper and then the Tio slaves (in that order). Afonso funded the missionaries’ proselytization in Nsundi, where he developed a small retinue of followers devoted to himself and identifiable by their conversions to Catholicism.
While not much is known about this initial decade, 1495–1506, it is clear that Afonso studied Catholic doctrine and history, just as would be required of any aspiring member of a skilled guild in Kongo, with zeal and devotion.8 In 1516, the Portuguese vicar (the top prelate resident in Kongo, the local representative of a bishop) recalled how Afonso had studied the Bible and other religious books so late into the night that he often fell asleep over his texts.9
The people of Kongo regarded reading as an inherently magical act along the lines of dealing with spirits, and Afonso’s ability to read Latin and Portuguese texts would have validated his claim to being able to access the power of the Christian God. He gained such a command of complex Catholic doctrine that even the priests turned to him for guidance in their pastoral duties.10 The priests, of course, needed Afonso’s insight into local culture to help them adjust their proselytization strategies. Language would have been a significant barrier, and there is some scant evidence that under Afonso’s tutelage Portuguese priests worked with Kongo Christians to translate Catholic ideas into Kikongo words. In 1548, only a few years after Afonso’s death in ca. 1542–1543, we find the first examples of Catholic phrasings translated into Kikongo, and less than a decade after his death, in 1555, the first Catholic catechism in Kikongo was published.11 Thus Afonso adopted Catholicism with an entirely Kongo sensibility that mandated that he, as the mani of these Catholics, be their master and expert. With Afonso’s sponsorship, the priests focused their conversion strategies in Nsundi first on baptizing their converts as souls saved individually and thus drawn out of their former loyalties to their communities. Then they hunted out and destroyed the artifacts the Kongo used to maintain these collective identities, which the priests identified as false idols sent by the devil of Christianity. By thus disrupting the strong Kongo ethos of community and calling individuals to stand off from their kin, the priests—and Afonso—were verging on appearing as what Kongo cosmology viewed as standoffish, greedy, traitorous witches.
Nzinga a Nkuwu appears to have reconciled with Afonso sometime before he died in 1506. His death set the stage for the usual struggle among the confederation’s contending factions to succeed him as mani Kongo, represented by the half siblings from his many wives. A few years later, in 1509, Afonso gathered his corps of personally devoted Kongo and Portuguese Catholics from Nsundi (Afonso later alleged, in the document beginning this chapter, that there were only thirty-seven of them, with their servants, or likely slaves, in numbers not specified) and marched on Mbanza Kongo, ostensibly to pay his respects to his father’s memory. Afonso’s small retinue managed to gain entrance inside the walls of Mbanza Kongo, but then they were surrounded by far greater numbers of warriors supporting one of his half brothers, named Mpanzu a Kitima, who had never accepted Catholicism. Facing the much larger force, including the full weight of the ideological heritage of the mani Kongo position, Afonso later recalled that his desperate men called out for divine help as they prepared to charge into battle on the plain outside the walls.12 Mpanzu a Kitima’s vast forces froze and then turned and fled, offering almost no resistance. As they ran away, many were slain. Survivors captured in the pursuit claimed that they had no choice but to take flight when they saw a magnificent white cross appear in the sky, with angelic riders on horses charging to Afonso’s aid. In Kongo terms, this terrifying apparition was the omen that confirmed, in a starkly otherworldly form, the authenticity and power of Christianity and Afonso’s authority as mani Kongo.
Afonso’s victory over his principal rival was apparently not enough to satisfy Kongo’s many networks, whose representatives complained to the influential senior counselor mani Mbata that Afonso had seized the position illegitimately, presumably against the precedence of the prestigious council of electors called the Mwissikongo. As Nzinga a Nkuwu had died three years prior, it is certainly possible that the electors had already designated Mpanzu a Kitima as the next mani Kongo, even if he had yet to undergo official investiture in the position. The mani Mbata at that time was Afonso’s maternal uncle. He was, according to the matrilineal affiliations prevailing in Kongo, head of the familial network from which Afonso had descended. He was in a position of authority over his nephew, and his group presumably stood to gain from Afonso taking the mani Kongo position. The mani Mbata supported Afonso’s cause. With his military and ideological support added to that of the Portuguese, Afonso was invested as mani Kongo in 1509. Since his victory in battle had demonstrated (from a Kongo perspective) that his power derived from his ability to channel access to the new and exclusionary Catholic God, people in the communities composing the polity would have accepted Catholic rituals—particularly baptism—as entirely consonant with the process of adding to the spiritized charms that confirmed transitions from one mani Kongo to the next.
Crowned as a Catholic, in 1512 Afonso dictated a letter in Portuguese to his Catholic brother in Lisbon, King Manuel I (r. 1495–1521), to justify and legitimize his rule over a Kongo kingdom in the monarchical sense intelligible to his Portuguese sponsors and allies. He also wrote three other letters, arguably intended to begin reshaping the Kongo political composite into a European-styled monarchy with a single ruler who had direct personal power over individual subjects.
